Red Hook - Hardcover

Cohen, Gabriel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312274580 ISBN 13: 9780312274580

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2001

Synopsis

It's not the dead body--Jack Leightner has seen hundred of bodies in his tour with the NYPD. It's not the dank setting--the narrow banks along Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. So why does the sight of the fatally stabbed young man make the detective almost faint in the canal's tangled weeds?

Jack doesn't understand why he becomes obsessed with this low-priority case, why he allows it to jeopardize his career and even his life. Especially since the investigation draws him exactly where he doesn't want to go: into the heart of Red Hook. The neighborhood is Leightner's bad dream, scene of his troubled childhood and a terrible secret.

The place also compels Jack's estranged son Ben, a young documentary filmmaker fascinated by its history. The Hook has been home to dockworkers and drug dealers, Al Capone and Joey Gallo, a giant public housing project, and one of the nation's greatest ports. Ben wants to find out why the once-thriving waterfront community has become a beautiful ruin--and why it has damaged his own family. In Gabriel Cohen's gripping first novel, this strange terrain is where Jack Leightner must seek his own redemption--and even, perhaps, the salvation of Red Hook itself. More than a crime story, Red Hook is a deep and sympathetic exploration of the mysteries of human nature, the curse and blessings of family, and one unforgettable place.

 

Red Hook is a 2002 Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel.

About this title

About the Author

Gabriel Cohen has worked as a reporter, inner-city schoolteacher, waiter, script reader, musician, and researcher. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where-when he isn't writing-he plays guitar and practices tai chi.

Reviews

This first effort from Cohen works both as a good mystery and a literary novel. It is better than promising (may the gods take note): it is accomplished. The mystery involves a young Dominican, Tomas Berrios, found stabbed to death with two concrete blocks tied to his legs. His killers were about to drop him in the river when they were seen and fled. No one who knew Tomas has any idea why he was murdered. He was a good worker, a married man with two children. Likewise, no one knows why Det. Jack Leightner threw up when he saw the body or has become obsessed with the case. The thing is, it happened in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn where Leightner was born. It brought back bad memories of his father, his dead brother, his failed marriage and the son from whom he has been alienated ever since. The more novelistic dimension of this noirish police procedural concerns the relationship of father and son, both seeking clues to their unhappy lives in Red Hook. The son, Ben, a would-be filmmaker, is more like his father than he realizes in his inability to make lasting relationships. He has never understood his father's apparent coldness. The author draws each of these characters with sensitivity. Their poignant relationship resonates with Cohen's portrait of present-day Red Hook, once a major port, abandoned by progress but not without hope. For such a realistic work the ending is a bit too pat, the plot's loose strings neatly tied in bows. Still, this is a fine novel deserving of attention. Agent, Paul Chung.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Brooklyn homicide detective Jack Leightner is the kind of detective who, when he's having dinner at his girlfriend's apartment, can't help but ask himself this question: If she were murdered and this were a crime scene, what clues would show whodunit? When the stabbing death of a small-time drug dealer triggers a rush of unwanted memories, Jack must face the fact that the whodunit in his own life is himself. As the mystery takes him into Red Hook, the working-class Brooklyn community where he was raised, Jack must solve the mystery of how he ended up divorced, estranged from his son, depressed, and alone. As Jack is wandering Red Hook, so is his estranged son, whose take on loneliness--"You never saw a [TV] show about a guy who lived alone and read a lot"--is priceless. Both son and father are now investigating the father's past, which holds a long-buried secret. This compelling first novel offers an amazingly deft mystery of character. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Detective Jack Leightner of the Brooklyn Homicide Task Force is called to assist the local precinct in the death of Tomas Berrios, a young Hispanic male from the Red Hook district of the borough. The investigators make little progress, but Leightner cannot let go of the Berrios murder. His professional and personal lives are intertwined, and we see the detective as a failed husband, an uncommunicative father, and a man trying to make peace with his 15-year-old brother's violent death. The problem is that first-time novelist Cohen has included elements of the literary novel, the police procedural, and the mystery but has forgotten the basics of each. The threads of the mystery get lost in this detective's personal angst and, even worse, he has crime scenes without medical examiners, does not mention autopsy reports, and refers to the victims as "vic" throughout. Donald Harstad and Kathy Reichs provide much better examples of homicide investigation. Public libraries in New York City might be interested; optional everywhere else. Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Red Hook

one

The Gowanus Canal was a bilious green. Long ago, Brooklyn kids had jumped in off its narrow banks to shout and splash around, but more than a century's worth of raw sewage and pollution from the adjoining factories had rendered the water unfit for every living thing except some algae and a tiny perverse species called killifish. Its opaque depths kept many secrets, but by a stroke of luck this corpse was not one of them.

The body lay in a scrub of sun-dry marsh grass at the top of the bank. As Detective Jack Leightner made his way up, his hamstrings strained, but he told himself he was still in good shape for a fifty-year-old. As a member of the elite Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force, he'd been called in to aid the local precinct with the investigation.

A team had already fanned out around the corpse, stooped over like migrant workers as they searched the ground for evidence: a scrap of clothing, a clump of hair, maybe just a cigarette butt with DNA evidence smooched on the filter ... A Crime Scene Unit photographer shifted around, snapping pictures.

One of the locals, a massive man with a bear's ponderousgait, straightened up and smiled as Jack approached. "Hey, whaddaya know?" he said. "The cavalry's here!"

At thirty, Gary Daskivitch was the youngest detective in the Seven-six Precinct. He and Jack had worked together the year before on a murder in the nearby Gowanus housing projects.

"You catch the case?" Jack asked.

"Yeah. Looks like we're partners again."

At four o'clock the August sun should have been high, but a bank of scudding dirty-cotton clouds dimmed the light. The air bore the heavy, metallic tang of an approaching storm.

"Hey, you see the Mets play last night?" Daskivitch asked.

Jack snorted and looked up at his partner, who stood a full head taller. "I saw it. Almost made me ashamed to be a New Yorker."

He tugged the knees of his slacks and squatted down. Baseball was fun, but not nearly as interesting as a fresh murder. The vic lay on his left side, splayed out in the grass in front of a chain-link fence. A beefy young man, he wore a pair of cheap gray dress slacks and a T-shirt beneath a red plaid shirt. Hispanic, probably mid-twenties. Several nasty bruises mottled his face but the cause of death was not apparent. The kid stared out, his eyes gray as the sky above; they glinted silver in the photographer's flash.

A chain joined two cinder blocks to his ankles. The fence, which marked the rear boundary of a lot filled with abandoned delivery trucks and a rusted black crane, curled up at the lower edge; a rusty spike had pierced the cuff of the victim's pants. The cloth was bloodsoaked: closer inspection revealed that the wire had also pierced the vic's calf.

Jack duckwalked around to look at the corpse's back. The man's well-muscled arms were tied behind him with ropeand his legs were similarly bound. "Hey, Dupree," Jack called out, "you get a close-up of these knots?" A particular knot could be a signature, linking this case to other murders.

"Got it," the photographer said curtly, annoyed by this questioning of his expertise.

The vic's T-shirt was raised above his belly, which hung to the side like a sad, soft gourd. If Jack didn't know better than to touch a corpse before the Crime Scene guys finished their job, he would have reached out to pull the shirt down.

"Who found the body?" he asked the young detective.

"We got an anonymous call early this afternoon."

"You ID him yet?"

"Nope."

"Okay," Jack said, rising. "Why don't you make a sketch while we wait."

Daskivitch took out a steno pad and began to draw the position of the body in relation to the fence and the canal.

Down on the water, a breeze jigged the reflections of the sky and the straggly trees and bushes that managed to cling to the banks. Across the way ran a long factory wall with no windows. Farther along, the canal was bordered by warehouses and industrial lots. A drawbridge crossed the water seventy yards to the north, but the sightlines were obscured by trees and tall grass. Whoever killed this man had picked a spot so isolated you could dump a body there in broad daylight.

Half a mile to the south, the F train shuttled across the skyline, a centipede on its elevated track. A mile over the horizon the canal would pass through Red Hook--where Jack was born, where his father had worked the docks--and then open into the Gowanus Bay and New York harbor.

Jack sidestepped down the bank. He watched a Clorox bottle and a potato-chip bag float south on the oil-slick water.Which would reach him first? He put his money on the Clorox bottle.

A minute later the chip bag slid by in first place.

"Hey, Jack!"

He turned and clambered back up, pleased to see that Daskivitch had been joined by Anselmo Alvarez, the head of the Crime Scene Unit, a short Dominican man with ramrod posture. A few strands of hair were combed carefully across Alvarez's bald pate, in tribute to what his ID photo revealed had once been a proud pompadour. The investigator was the best forensics man in Brooklyn--he took seriously the responsibility of standing up for the dead.

"Let's start," Jack said.

Daskivitch shut his notepad. The men pulled on white latex gloves and crouched down.

First Jack checked the victim's pants for identification. Due to the execution-style disposition of the body, there wasn't much chance of finding any, but he had to check. Even after twelve years in Homicide, it still felt odd to reach his hands into someone else's pockets. They were empty.

The victim's kinky black hair was pressed out awkwardly against the dirt.

"We can surmise one thing right off the bat," Alvarez said. "The deceased is having a very bad hair day."

Jack smiled. Alvarez himself could not really be said to have hair days at all anymore, but he kept the thought to himself.

He noted the soul patch, the tuft of beard under the vic's bottom lip, and the tattoo of a jaguar on the right tricep. The red and green lines of the tattoo were crusted over--it was either fresh or had just been renewed. Jack had never gotten a tattoo, even during his time in the Army: a tattoo would brand you forever. He avoided bumperstickers onany car he owned for the same reason. It was better to go through life unmarked.

"What should we do next?" he asked Gary Daskivitch. When it came to murders, the kid was a rookie. (With only four homicides in the past year, the Seventy-sixth Precinct was hardly a crisis zone.) He'd learn better if he was pushed to do more than just watch.

The young detective frowned in concentration. "How about we check to see how long he's been here?"

"Okay. How we gonna do that?"

"I guess ... first we need to get him off the fence." Daskivitch took a breath, then reached out and hesitantly prodded the corpse. Jack traded a subtle wink with Alvarez; the rookie hadn't yet seen enough bodies to be comfortable with the task. Hell, the kid didn't even look comfortable wearing a suit.

It took the men several minutes to disengage the victim's leg and pants cuff from the rusty chain-link.

Daskivitch rolled the body forward; he noted that the weeds underneath had not had time to brown.

"You're doing good," Jack said.

Alvarez took out a flashlight and shone it into one of the victim's eyes: the cornea was clouded over. The forensics man pressed his hands against the face, arms, upper body. Jack followed his example. The body was rigid until he reached the thighs, where the flesh still rolled under his palm.

"Feel this," he told the young detective.

Daskivitch winced as he patted the body. Other veterans would have baited the rookie with wisecracks, but Jack refrained. He liked the young detective. The kid was brash--he'd recently come from several years of playing cowboy with a narcotics squad, leaping out of vans and making tough with crack sellers--but he took his new job seriously and was eager to learn.

"What do you think?" Jack said.

"Rigor mortis hasn't set in all the way down."

"Correct. How many hours since the lights went out?"

"I dunno." That was another good thing about the kid--he didn't bullshit. "Less than twelve?"

"I'd say six."

Alvarez nodded. "I'll have to take an internal temp to make sure, but that sounds about right."

The back of the dead man's neck was purple, a different tint from the bruises. Jack pushed a finger into the flesh and pulled it back. The spot momentarily whitened. He knelt down and pulled the back of the T-shirt up: same purple discoloration, same white spot when pressed.

"The body was moved postmortem," Jack said. "How do I know?"

Daskivitch frowned again. "Uh, lividity, right? After the blood stopped circulating, it would have pooled in the lowest parts of the body. That should be his side, not the back."

"Good." Jack turned to Alvarez. "Could these blows to the face have done him in?"

The forensics man stared down thoughtfully. "I think that was just a warm-up."

"Help me here," Alvarez said to Jack. They rolled the body over and Alvarez pulled aside the plaid shirt. The T-shirt underneath was stained with a big patch of rust-colored blood. There was no blood on the ground, confirmation that the body had been moved.

Alvarez rolled the T-shirt up the victim's chest. "There you go."

At first Jack didn't see what he was talking about, but then Alvarez pressed down on the corpse's side, opening the thin ugly slit of a stab wound. Jack pressed his hands against the spiky grass and squeezed his eyes shut. Sweat beaded his upper lip.

"You okay?" Alvarez asked.

Jack nodded, but swallowed, fighting the bile rising in his throat. His head swam and he wa...

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312274580
• ISBN 13: 9780312274580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304